“Casdo’s got no apartment here,” she said. “He lives in the janitor’s quarters down the steps to the left. If it’s a police thing you can tell him for me it’s the last time. He can just dear out.” She leaned forward, sharing a confidence in a faintly whining voice. “Officer, I’d of fired the sonofabitch a long time ago, but janitors are hard to keep.”
General Bogan went down the steps two at a time and rapped on the door at the bottom. There was a shuffle inside and he heard a Southern-accented voice say, “You got no right, son, to barge in and start in on us like this. Damn it, I won’t stand for it.”
The door swung open and the light from four naked bulbs in an old brass chandelier caught everything in the room in a pitiless and hard illumination.
The man at the door was unquestionably Cascio’s father, they had the same features. But the man was drunk, his face slack, his eyes bloodshot, his pants baggy. He had the pinched, furtive, crabbed look of the long-time drunkard. He looked like an older, ruined version of his son.
Colonel Cascio was sitting behind a table covered with a linoleum cloth. He sat straight in the chair, an untouched plate of barbecued spare ribs and black beans in front of him. Leaning against a stove was Colonel Cascio’s mother. She had a waspish look and was very thin and wore an old cotton dress and black felt slippers which were too large for her. General Bogan realized that she also was a drunkard… and not only because she held a pint of muscatel in her hand. It had to do with the posture, the beaten face, the suspicious eyes.
“Sir, I am General Bogan and I am calling for Colonel Cascio,” General Bogan said. Standing in darkness he realized that his aide had not yet recognized him. At his words Colonel Cascio came half out of his chair, a look of pure agony on his face.
“Let the gennelmun in, Walt,” Colonel Cascio’s mother said. Her face spread into a mask of welcome, so broad it was grotesque. She stepped toward the door, her feet spread, balancing carefully. An amber thread of muscatel flowed from the bottle onto the floor.
The father, cued on some deep level, bowed to General Bogan. He muttered some extravagant words of welcome. “Son always speaks well of you, sir… honored have ya’ eat with us… or anything… just anything.”
There was a long moment of silence, a moment in which General Bogan understood something which he had never bothered to analyze before. Colonel Cascio’s parents had Tennessee accents; they were hill people who never adjusted to the city life. And they were the reason that Colonel Casdo never spoke with a Southern accent, never drank, and was unmarried. His military career was everything.
Colonel Casdo had broken the squalid tableau. He stood straight, walked to the doorway and saluted General Bogan.
“Yes, sir,” he said, and he was under perfect control. “I gather we’re needed for a drill.”
“That’s it, Colonel Sorry to break up your time at home.”
Colonel Cascio smiled thinly at him. He turned and, deliberately and heavily, as if he were swinging shut a bank vault, dosed the door. Behind the thin panels his father’s voice yelped, “Ungrateful damned snot-nosed kid. So damned uppity.”
They got quietly in the car and neither of them had ever spoken of the episode.
General Bogan himself came from a Tennessee family with a strong military tradition. They had always lived in the high hills of Tennessee and the land had never been able to support all of the sons. The milltary had been the only acceptable nonfarsning occupation for Bogan’s family. Ever since colonial days at least one Bogan had been in the armed forces of the United States. Some had been enlisted men, some officers. During the Civil War, Bogans had fought on both sides. Bogan’s grandfather had been a naval captain and an aide to Admiral Mahan. His father had been a sergeant in the infantry and had been decorated twice in World War I with the Silver Star. General Grant Lee Bogan’s first and middle names came to him, not because his father had a sense of humor, but because he thought that General Grant and General Lee were the greatest generals in American history. The fact that they had fought on opposite sides did not appear to him to be ironic. Grant Lee Bogan was the first of the Bogans to be a general officer.
Bogan’s attention snapped back to the War Room. It was Knapp’s voice saying, “It’s almost like working in a submarine, isn’t it, General?”
“Only the air lock reminds me of a submarine,” General Bogan said. “After a while you get used to being four hundred feet under the surface and it’s just like any other job.”
General Bogan was not telling the complete truth. In fact he had disliked the War Room when he was first assigned as its commander. He had joined the Air Force back in the l930s for one specific reason: to fly planes. For almost thirty-two years he had done precisely that. He had flown the early biplane fighters, later the P-38, the P-5l, and after the war he had moved into the jet bombers. He flew “by the book” and had a reputation for being more methodical than imaginative. But to his methodicalness there was also added courage. These two things had earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross during World War II.
He had been flying a P-38 escorting a group of B-17s on a day raid over Germany. It was early in the war and the fighter pilots could not resist temptation. Some of them made passes at Focke-Wulfs which were still at a considerable distance. Others could not resist joining in a dogfight which was already being amply handed by other fighters. General Bogan flew a perfectly mechanical and orthodox flight. He stayed with the bombers he had been ordered to defend, he nursed his fuel supply, he fired only in short bursts. The result was that every other one of the escorting fighters had reached its fuel range fifty miles before the target was in sight. One by one they swung away for the flight back to England. When the B-17s came over target General Bogan was the only fighter with them. He stumbled into a perfect setup. The Focke-Wulfs, thinking that all the fighters had left, became careless. A long string of eight fighters came up from below to strike at the bellies of the B-17s. Bogan put on additional speed and methodically began to clobber the line of German fighters. He came in on the blind port quarter of each of the Focke-Wulfs, gave a short burst directly into the cockpit hoping to kill the pilot before he could give a warning. Neatly, following the instructions he had been given during months of training, Bogan shot down six of the eight Focke-Wulfs. In avoiding the exploding debris of the six planes he pulled back quickly on the yoke and gained several hundred feet of altitude. In that moment the seventh and eighth planes saw him and instantly put on speed and began to loop back toward him. Again Bogan followed the book. Using the slight speed advantage which the P-38 had he kept just far enough ahead of the two German fighters to be Out of cannon range. They followed him almost to the English Channel, tantalized by the prospect of a kill, made reckless by the death of their six comrades. Bogan had calmly called ahead on his radio and twenty miles from the English Channel a group of P-38s were circling high in the sky waiting for him. They came screaming down, every advantage on their side, and thirty seconds later the last of the Focke-Wulfs were destroyed.
Bogan always felt guilty about receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross. All he had done was follow instructions. Like everyone that flew in combat he had felt fear, deep and rooted and unending, as long as he was in action. But on the operation which earned his decoration he felt no special danger or risk-only the same familiar fear.
The last plane which General Bogan had flown in operation was the B-58, the Hustler. Then he had almost failed a physical examination. It was not clear-cut. The flight surgeon had hesitated, evaded his eyes, talked about the kinesthetic atrophy and its correlation with age, eye-hand reflex and reaction times. The discussion had been general but they both knew what it meant. If General Bogan insisted on flying the Hustler he would be labeled physically unfit. If he would content himself with flying the slower bombers or, fly as a copilot he could stay in the air. It had been a hard moment. Then General Bogan had mentioned, quite casually, that he’d been thinking of turning his efforts away from operations and more to strategy. “Flying is a young man’s game,” he lied. “We oldsters have to accept the responsibility for the big picture.”
In the end the two men wordlessly agreed. Bogan would shift to a ground assignment provided he could occasionally fly T-33s, “to keep his hand in.”
In two weeks General Bogan had been promoted to lieutenant general and assigned as commanding officer of the War Room.
General Bogan looked sideways at Raskob. He understood something of the disappointment that Raskob felt. He could recall his own initial impression of the WarRoom all too sharply. General Bogan had hated the elevator. The elevator shot downwards in one long sickening 400-foot drop. The last five feet of deceleration gave him a sharp sense of leaden helplessness. Then, after the elevator doors dosed, the small room in which one stood became a compression chamber. The air pressure in the War Room was kept a little higher than normal atmosphere so that no dust could filter in to foul the machinery or atomic fallout to contaminate the humans.
